NORRISTOWN — The lethal road to heroin and other drug addictions often begins with prescription pills from the medicine cabinet.

With that disturbing trend in mind, Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman, in conjunction with federal, state, county and local law enforcers, has launched a program that allows citizens to anonymously dispose of unused or unwanted prescription drugs in a safe and convenient fashion.

Under the initiative, known as the Montgomery County Prescription Drug Collection and Disposal Program, 10 permanent prescription drug disposal boxes will be available at eight police departments, including Pottstown, Limerick, Souderton, Hatfield, Lower Merion, Abington, Franconia and Upper Merion and at the county courthouse.

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“Our law enforcement professionals recognize the steady growth of prescription drug abuse in the community, particularly among our youth. We have seen time and again that addiction often begins with minors stealing powerful narcotics from their parents’ medicine cabinets,” Ferman said on Thursday.

Authorities, Ferman said, have seen teens turn from underage drinking parties to so-called “pharm parties” where they collect pills they steal from home medicine cabinets and share them with their friends. Once addicted, the users might purchase the pills at very high prices from drug dealers or shift their usage to less expensive street drugs such as heroin.

The purpose of the collection and disposal program, Ferman said, is prevention and education.

“We want to educate parents about the way kids are getting addicted to drugs, starting with prescription drugs, and how that can be a gateway to heroin. We want to educate parents about how to get rid of those opportunities inside their own homes and inside their medicine cabinets to minimize the opportunities for kids to get hooked,” Ferman said.

In a recent Mercury series that examined heroin addiction in the county, law enforcement officials said recreational use of prescription drugs often leads down a road to heroin use. One trend involves young people dabbling in opioids, raiding the medicine cabinets of their parents for potent painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet.

“I think The Mercury’s heroin series did a great job of highlighting a problem that we’re facing in the community. Heroin is the end problem, but many of those heroin addicts started as addicts to prescription drugs. They started in medicine cabinets, they get addicted to pills, they do everything they can to try to find the pills and unfortunately, tragically, sometimes those addicts wind up turning to heroin,” Ferman said.

“That’s why we’re seeing this heroin problem in our suburban communities. Many of these people have started with prescription drug addiction and then continue to look for something that will be stronger,” Ferman added.

The opioid turned heroin addiction problem cuts across all age and socioeconomic barriers, The Mercury investigation found.

Ferman said the only way to truly make an impact in reducing the epidemic of prescription drug addiction is to focus on prevention efforts like the drug disposal box program.

“In order for us to do this in a secure manner, the boxes will be located inside law enforcement agencies or at the county courthouse. They’re secure boxes, so when you make a deposit in the box you cannot then take anything out. The boxes themselves are secured inside and are monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week so that there’s no opportunity for tampering or theft,” Ferman explained.

The disposal program is entirely anonymous. Citizens will not be asked where they got the medications. Citizens concerned about their identities being revealed, can simply take the labels with identifying information off the prescription bottles before they dispose of them, officials suggested.

“The point of the program is safe, environmentally appropriate disposal of these medications…there’s no investigative use,” Ferman said. “The point is to get drugs out of medicine cabinets that aren’t being used, to get them safely disposed of so that other people don’t have access to them and that they’re not polluting our environment.”

County and local law enforcement will collect the pills, which will then be turned over to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for destruction.

The seeds for the permanent program were planted in April 2010 when the district attorney’s office held a medicine collection event at four locations. At that time, the public turned over 513 pounds of medication to keep it out of the hands of youth. During the last three years, numerous local police departments also participated in a nationwide drug collection program dubbed “Got Drugs?” sponsored by the DEA.

“What really struck me three years ago when we did our first prescription drug collection event was a broader awareness of how prescription drugs have taken over as this epidemic in our community,” Ferman said. “We started to see trends in drug abuse coming off the street corner into the medicine cabinets.”

“I started to learn about kids, teenagers or young adults going into medicine cabinets, taking other people’s prescriptions, becoming addicted and then seeing the tragic consequences of those kinds of addictions, whether it’s an overdose and death or criminal activity and they wind up locked up,” Ferman added.

Ferman hopes the collection program eventually will expand to include every police department in the county.

“It’s my hope that we’ll have one of these medicine collection boxes in every police department in Montgomery County,” Ferman said.